Delivery vans from Rivian (Nasdaq: RIVN) are getting a little cooler.
The Irvine EV maker in 2019 inked a deal with Amazon to make electric-powered vans for the ecommerce giant, with an initial goal of making 100,000 vehicles. Ultimately, about 20,000 van deliveries were made, before an exclusivity agreement ended.
Last month, the automaker announced that its “Rivian Commercial Vehicles” would be available for all businesses, for fleets of any size. The cost is about $80,000 per vehicle.
Among the first notable companies scooping up some of the unique-looking vans is Vermont’s Ben & Jerry’s, which this month announced a new fleet of electric ice cream vans.
The first of the “scoop trucks” was seen in Laguna Beach, at Rivian’s showroom along Coast Highway, before making its way to the South by Southwest event in Austin, Texas. The trucks have a range of 161 miles on full charge.
Whether Rivian gets a stock charge from being seen as a cooler alternative to $710 billion-valued Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA), amid the latter EV company’s increasingly damaged reputation in the U.S. and abroad, remains to be seen. The OC firm’s stock is down some 19% this year, with a market cap of $11 billion. Tesla’s shares are down nearly 35% over the same period.
When Costa Mesa defense contractor Anduril Industries last December inked a partnership with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to “develop and responsibly deploy advanced artificial intelligence solutions for national security missions,” there was one notable critic: Tesla’s Elon Musk.
“Musk expressed frustration to some associates about the deal,” noted a report last month in the Wall Street Journal, as part of a story documenting the increasingly sour relationship between Musk and Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Musk left the company in 2018.
It seems likely Palmer Luckey was among those associates. A lengthy WSJ interview with Luckey published on March 7 quoted the Anduril founder saying he and the world’s wealthiest person exchange texts “fairly regularly.”
In Silicon Valley, there’s “a lot of interpersonal dynamics,” Luckey told the WSJ.
“There are people that I work with that Elon doesn’t like. There’re people that Elon works with that I don’t like. There’re people that Elon works with (at Facebook) who fired me and who ripped away my company from me. And guess what? My president does the same thing, and yet I still vote for him and support him.”
The last group text that Musk and Luckey were on together concerned the music of the Black Eye Peas, the Lido Isle resident told the WSJ.
“I’d say we are associates or colleagues,” Luckey said of Musk. “I don’t know if I deserve the title of a friend. If Elon says that I’m his friend, then I will gladly accept so, but we definitely get along.”
Anduril’s latest big win: a nearly $650 million contract with the U.S. Marines, to help fight drone attacks on their bases.
